


legacy babies

by fartherfaster



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Trip Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 18:11:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3456899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It was always going to come to this.</i><br/>-<br/>History has that pernicious habit of repeating itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	legacy babies

**Author's Note:**

> A fix-it fic - I looked at the immediate aftermath of the winter finale and said, "But what if nope." Also, I ship TripSkye like I'm Canada fucking Post; that is, with a lot of hasty prayers and crying.  
> -  
> Another note: Lance isn't allowed to curse on the show, but I think everyone anticipates the fact that he probably swears like a _fucking frat boy._

Bloody hands in the past mean bloody hands in the future, and Trip, just like his grandfather, was one of a few crazy-brave men willing to run straight down into Hell to keep everyone else safe. Skye watches him turn to ash under her fingers; in her mind she calls herself a monster. _It was always going to come to this_.

 

The very Earth shakes under her feet, and she runs away as the cavern crumbles. There is the howl of an animal behind her, something wounded and high and glorious, and it streaks past her down the shivering tunnels, shedding quills in its wake. Skye picks a few up from the floor as she bends, dips, skids in the dust, running too fast around a corner. They sting and shred the tips of her fingers, but it’ll be worth it. Raina got her wish; now everyone can see how truly different she is.

 

Skye only wanted a family, but history has that pernicious habit of repeating itself.

 

-

 

She’s nearly in hysterics by the time she makes it to the team. Coulson is slung weakly between Morse and Mack, his bloody face drooping, and Skye feels something in her chest constrict and burn with guilt. Hunter has one hand on Fitz’s shoulder, who has wrapped himself protectively around Simmons, an elbow up over her head to save her from the falling debris. May sees her first, and yells when she spots her. Mack and Morse stop and look back, motions synchronous; Coulson finds his feet but not his balance, and he sways between them. May shoves at everyone, yelling at them to get out. “I’ve got them,” she tells Morse - the only one who’s listening - and the group flees.

 

“Where’s Trip?” May grabs Skye’s shoulders, tries to look into her face. Skye presents her with her bleeding hand, full of Raina’s new quills.

 

“It’s my fault,” Skye says, and she can’t stifle her tears. “I’m so sorry; it’s my fault. I touched the Obelisk and then it _broke_ -” she chokes on a sob, and the earth around them trembles terribly.

 

“We have to go!” May orders, pulling Skye with her, “We have to leave, now, or this place is going to cave in around us.”

 

A crack forms in the floor on the far side of the room, and it sounds like the air is being ripped. It sounds like the rock is crying. The split meets no resistance, and the sandstone gives way. It stretches towards them faster than Skye thought possible, coming straight for their feet. May, encouraging a moment ago, seems to have lost her nerve. Skye grabs her by the wrist with her free hand, and they run.

 

-

 

The ground falls apart as May launches the Bus into the air.

 

Skye does her level best to hold herself still as Simmons flutters back and forth between her ruined hand and Coulson’s battered nose. Morse had taken the quills from her hand, and Mack took over Coulson’s questioning when he only managed to spit out more blood than words.

 

“What happened, Skye?”

 

“It separated,” she says numbly. “The sides of the Obelisk fell down and a crystal grew up, out of it.” She shakes her head, still baffled by the visual. “It let out a shock wave, sort of, first, and then,” she pauses, but before she can speak again there’s the sound of running across the catwalk, the thunder of boots on the spiral stairs, and then a gust and slam of impact of someone deciding to skip the last ten steps and jump the railing. Everyone in the medbay turns in time to see Trip, very alive, slap his palm on the switch for the doors. Simmons screams very quietly behind her gloved hand.

 

Trip’s sunshine disposition is nowhere in sight. His voice is chilled when he asks, “Does anybody wanna tell me why I just came to in my bunk? Because my last memory was dyin’, and I don’t think you’re s’posed to remember that.”

 

Coulson heaves a gusty sigh. “Welcome to the club, I guess.”

 

Skye cannot keep her sounds inside her chest, and Trip looks at her with tenderness. “C’mon, girl,” he chides, opening his arms. “What’re you doin’, cryin’ for me?”

 

Skye leaps down from the table and throws herself at him; Trip staggers back a step with her impact, but he catches her nonetheless. She can’t keep in the tears or her apologies, and she curls one arm around him, the other touching his face, his throat, the bone and bulk of his clavicle and shoulder. “You died,” she weeps, and that terrible, guilty feeling blooms greasy in her chest again, “you fell apart _and it was my fault._ ” Skye’s emotions choke her; she can barely breathe, and the panic starts again. The lights in the medbay flicker, and then two monitors and one mobile medical lamp literally _explode_. Everyone ducks and screams and the alarms on the SUVs start to wail, and May’s voice comes over the comm system.

 

“ _What the hell is happening down there?_ ”

 

Skye can feel the pulses this time; they leave her chest in waves. It’s the same sensation as walking too closely to the bass in a club, that rattle in your ribs that makes your heart stutter. But Skye can tell it’s coming from inside of her - she looks to Trip, because he’s standing too close, he’s turning to ash again, disintegrating into black dust under her fingers, and she screams so long and so deep that something gives inside her chest, something lets go, and a wave of sensation takes her down to the floor, the ash of Trip’s body rising up in a cloud.

 

-

 

May puts them down in the middle of nowhere.

 

“Who is going to tell me -” she starts. Morse holds up a hand, but Hunter starts talking first.

 

“Look, Agent May,” he says, “nobody seems to have anything smart to say, even the fucking geek squad,” he waves a hand in a broad gesture towards Fitzsimmons and Morse, who are gathered around the same microscope, and then points an incriminating finger to the quarantine space, “but these two have some alien shit goin' on, so we’ve stuck ‘em in there, ‘cause every time Skye gets the weepies Triplett fuckin' disintegrates and she _blows the place up_.”

 

Mack stops working from where he’s bent over a roasted monitor, and he shrugs at May like he can’t be bothered to deny anything.

 

Coulson pulls the gauzy pad out from under his still-bleeding nose. Both his eyes are blackened, but not yet swollen; one eyebrow has split cleanly in two over the heavy bone of his brow. “Well, Hunter’s not wrong,” he says thickly.

 

-

 

Mack hastily puts Skye into the quarantine cell, and as he dashes back out Morse punches out the lockdown code while its electrics still function. As soon as Skye had passed out, the shaking stopped, and nobody seems to be ready to talk about that. Mack turns to look back at the girl he just abandoned in there, and the black dust on her clothes and arms swirls thickly in the air, shimmering and moving and growing and-

 

“What the hell,” he nearly shouts.

 

Hunter skids across the lab to peer between their bodies. “Oh, okay,” he says sarcastically, “what the fuck is happening, really now. Bobbi,” he looks up at her, “you are fucking with me, right, luv, because this is-”

 

“Lance!” she cuts him off, watching with wide eyes as Trip’s body comes back into being, he only a little more conscious than Skye. He blinks hazily once, twice, sees who it is in his arms, and then folds himself around her more tightly, rolling them over on the floor until Skye’s smaller body is lost to his bulk; one pale hand visibly clutched in the leather at the dip of his waist, the toe of one boot poking out from between his calves.

 

“Oh, dear,” says Simmons weakly.

 

“Alright,” Fitz agrees simultaneously, “alright, yeah, this is weird.”

 

-

 

Fitz futzes with a comm unit until it puts out a signal strong enough to transmit through the bomb-proofsound-proofair-tight glass of the quarantine cell. Mack passes it through the little exchange box, and Skye sulks at it before Trip jostles her shoulder and plucks it from her hand. When they woke up, they’d glared through the glass with impotent rage and clung to one another; running charades put on by Fitzsimmons assured them both that A) means of communication where imminent, and B) this was only because Skye kept frying the circuits. Trip just _resolidified_ out of thin air in her arms.

 

“So what we’re telling you,” Coulson says to Agent May through the gummy residue of his broken nose, “is that Skye isn’t the only 084. On the Bus.”

 

“It’s really plausible enough,” Simmons jumps in, and Fitz continues:

 

“If you consider that his his his,” he waves an impatient hand.

 

“Grandfather,” she supplies.

 

“Yes! Could have very well touched the Obelisk without any repercussions, and we already know that this whole thing is genetic,” he adds.

 

“And so it could have carried harmlessly down to Agent Triplett without catastrophic affects-”

 

“You mean the village I was found in? Because that was my psycho dad, not me,” Skye barks.

 

“And apparently some manifestations of 084,” here, Simmons stutters for a word, her mouth slack and doe-eyes nervous.

 

“...Abilities,” cuts in Morse, “some 084 abilities are easier to control or influence than others. Skye’s are obviously connected to her emotions,” who, through the glass, waves her good hand around dramatically, “and Antoine’s seem to primarily protect him from mortal harm.”

 

Trip grins at Agent May, winsome.

 

“So they’re both totally out of fucking control,” Hunter mutters into his own shoulder.

 

Mack casts him an ugly look. Fitzsimmons exchange glances, and then they both turn to May.

 

“They’re sort of in control,” Coulson allows. “Trip just has to… not die,” he says expansively, “and Skye has to stay calm.”

 

“It’s easier to stay calm when I have a reason to stay calm,” Skye complains over the comm. “It has also been a very bad day. And are we not going to talk about how Raina’s got spikes and claws, now? Because we should be talking about that. Talk!” She waves her still-bloody hand in the air like it's a biblical truth.

 

“Skye, there is always a reason to stay calm,” May tells her, face stony.

 

Skye blinks impatiently.

 

“The reason is being calm.”

 

Skye puts her head in her hands for a moment, and then sweeps her hair out of her face. “Okay,” she says grandly, “I’m totally calm.”

 

The comm unit crackles with fuzzy static, and the tools on the lab bench start to jitter and tremble. Skye takes a very deep breath and hold herself very still, her face writ with alarm. Trip wraps his arm protectively around her shoulder.

 

“Maybe I’ll work on being calm,” she allows. There are still flecks of ash on her hands and clothes; she brushes them off. Putting the comm back on the floor - and casting a cold look through the glass that says they are not animals to be observed by those on the other side - she turns to Trip. “You have to stop leaving bits of yourself everywhere every time you do… the thing,” she says, fluttering the fingers on her good hand.

 

“The thing?” Trip asks, smiling. “Girl, I can do plenty of things.”

 

“Your…” Skye pauses, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust routine. That thing.”

 

“Okay,” he says amiably, “but you gotta stop shaking my world like you do. A man can’t take too much of that.” He holds his arms open a little further, and Skye scooches across the cot to bury her nose in the dip of his chest.

 

“Aww,” she says, climbing into his embrace and gathering up his shirt in her fist like this is just a joke, like she doesn’t feel - in every sense of the word, an alien - “you can feel it, too?”

  
Trip’s big palm cradles the back of her head as he laughs, and Skye feels the nervous quaking settle inside her. 


End file.
